Many people consider XML Sitemaps as an optional extra, but the fact is XML Sitemaps help not only in the indexation of your pages by providing a full list of URLs on your website, but also to provide other useful information to search engines about your site. For example, by submitting “/” as your root domain instead of “default.aspx” through the XML Sitemap, search engines like Google might just figure out “/” is the main URL and this may help with the canonical issues.
Other benefits of XML Sitemaps include:
1- Help improve the crawl rate and indexation on a site
2- Help the crawling of newer content
3- Help spot problems or raise trouble flags (In the case of Google, problems are reported in Webmaster Tools)
In XML Sitemaps, we generally include all the URLs of our site to help search engines discover most of our URLs. We can also create XML Sitemaps for other content like videos and mobile web pages to make them easily discoverable by search engines. In this post, I will cover most of the XML Sitemaps and will talk about videos and mobile sitemaps in a future post.
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